How Would McCain Have Handled North Korea?

The good news came yesterday.  The United States would, upon receiving North Korea's full declaration of its nuclear programs, remove North Korea from the "terrorist watch list".   As promised, North Korea delivered the declaration to China today.

President Bush today:

...we welcome today's development as one step of a multi-step process."

He added, "If North Korea continues to make the right choices, it can repair its relationship with the international community much as Libya has done over the past few years."

Again, congratulations to the Bush Administration for defusing (or, at least, beginning to defuse) a very dangerous situation.  There are reports the diplomatic path was strenuously opposed by some in the Administration,  calling any negotiations with the Koreans appeasement.  They favored, instead, turning the screws, tougher sanctions and some openly discussed a possible military intervention.  Those individuals, thankfully, were overruled.

Given today's news, I would argue the Administration took the wise, prudent path and the results speak for themselves.

There's probably some value in documenting John McCain's public statements on North Korea.  After all, the Senator's statements would give insight into how a McCain Administration would handle a nuclear powered North Korea.  From an analysis of McCain's March 1999 speech at Kansas State University:

The cornerstone of his thinking was a sweeping doctrine, "call it rogue-state rollback if you will" of "supporting indigenous and outside forces that desire to overthrow the odious regimes that rule these states."

McCain repeated this trope throughout the speech, drawing on his personal history and adopting the rhetoric of moral seriousness about the consequences of committing American forces. But awareness of the consequences was, for McCain, no reason to avoid starting a war. Indeed, McCain almost seemed disappointed that the Clinton administration managed to peacefully resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis with the "agreed framework" of 1994. He remarked in Kansas that "a firmer response to North Korea might have triggered a war, a war we would win, but not without paying a terrible price." McCain was sophisticated enough to recognize that other policy options such as refusing aid to the North might nonetheless have resulted in conflict "as the North's last desperate measure."

In a May 2008 editorial to the Asian Wall Street Journal (co-written by Joe Lieberman), McCain writes:

"We must use the leverage available from the U.N. Security Council resolution passed after Pyongyang's 2006 nuclear test to ensure the full and complete declaration, disablement and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear facilities, in a verifiable manner, which we agreed to with the other members of the six-party talks." McCain and Lieberman write. The Bush administration essentially abandoned enforcement of the U.N. Resolution when early in 2007 it decided to negotiate an end to the impasse.

It's clear a McCain Administration would have, at the least, continued to implement additional sanctions that had proved ineffective and refused to engage diplomatically with the North Koreans.  And, in all likelihood, North Korea would be even further down the road in terms of its nuclear capabilities.  In the worse case, Senator McCain seemed resigned to the possibility the U.S. would be required to initiate a war in order to end the Koreans nuclear ambitions. 

I never thought I would say this: thank God the mature and cool heads of the Bush Administration prevailed and didn't heed the careless and simplistic recommendations of folks like John McCain.

The world is a wee bit more peaceful today as a result.